Chicago State University (CSU) is an institution with a predominantly African-American student body. Located on the south-side of Chicago, CSU serves the highest proportion of black students of all public universities in the Illinois-lndiana-lowa-Wisconsin contiguous four-state region where it is the largest producer of black baccalaureate degree recipients. The CSU MBRS SCORE Program is a response to the NIH initiative to improve significantly the research capabilities of minority and minority-serving institutions as a means to address the need to increase the numbers of minority students entering doctoral programs in the biomedical sciences. The quantitative goals of the CSU MBRS SCORE Program are (1) to increase the number of junior faculty engaged in biomedical research, and (2) to increase the number of biomedical research publications from CSU teaching faculty. The qualitative goal of the Program is to create a research environment at CSU which stimulates faculty to engage in discovery research and which encourages students to point their career goals to leadership positions in biomedical research. [unreadable] [unreadable] The CSU Program organizes its activities around faculty-led research projects in biology and chemistry. The current Program consists of five research projects of which all but one is led by junior faculty who have been hired within the past three years. This supplemental application contains two new subprojects from recently hired faculty and two re-submissions of subprojects which were not funded in a previous application. [unreadable] [unreadable]